Now that I’m confident I’ve clinched the world’s most inconsistent blogger award for 2011, I think it’s probably safe to return to my poor, poor, neglected website.  I could list some real excuses: work, an (un)healthy Minecraft addiction, laziness, but I grow weary of that game.  Whatever the reasons for my absence, I’ve wanted to get back to it for some time now, but I haven’t been able to find the right topic to return on.  Most of what I came up with was either too heavy or too complicated to make for good bloggardly reading, but I realized that if I kept shooting down everything that occurred to me I’d never write anything.

So when my brother sent me a certain link, I decided, hell, I’ll just go with that.  The particular link he sent me is this one.  It’s a Japanese blog the content of which I can understand not one word.  But that’s not the point.  I don’t need to be able to read Japanese to see why my brother sent it to me.  If you open the link, you’ll notice the following picture:

Cute, right?  An interesting picture, certainly nothing to write home to mom about.  But that’s not why my brother sent it to me.  He sent it to me because I took the picture.  As a matter of fact, I took it on my way home from school for the last time after graduating in 2009.  And it’s no mystery as to how it got on the internet; I put it there.  I posted it to Reddit shortly after I got home and enjoyed myself perhaps to an inappropriate degree as the image gained popularity and eventually made it to the front page (if you don’t believe me, click the link).

That’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of accomplishments, probably just under learning to walk.  But at the time it felt like my fifteen minutes of fame.  What it turned out to be was a nice little lesson in the realities of the internet.  Almost as soon as I had posted it on reddit, my image appeared on then-rival social news site Digg, which had been accused on a minute-by-minute basis of sniping content from Reddit until its fall from popularity last year.

I was livid, of course.  The idea that some other user was reaping imaginary and worthless points on some other site, of which I wasn’t even a member, was inexcusable.  Forget the irony of wanting credit for taking a picture of what is essentially someone else’s cleverness.   So what do you do when someone steals the stuff you put out there on the internet?  If you answered, “Complain about it on the internet,” you’d be right on the money.  The chief response to my complaints was, “welcome to the internet,” and that, too, was right on the money.  It was ludicrous of me to expect anything else.  Thinking about it now, I’m reminded of a line from Futurama: “the internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas.”

So when my brother sent the link to the Japanese blog, I decided to Tineye my picture and see to what other exotic shores the digital tide had carried it.  Tineye found 35 results, which is modest, unless you consider the billions of images that must be out there on the interwebs, in which case 35 becomes insignificant as 1.  And my anonymous mediocre fame isn’t limited only to Japanese blogs.  My picture seems to have found its way onto such far-flung sites as this collection of unbelievably un-Photoshopped images on a German-hosted Russian blog and such prestigious pages as The Chive’s all-cleavage-shot gallery, “Ball Girls are the Poor Man’s Sexy Tennis Star”.  That last one baffles me some.

This little picture is even one of the flagship images at the head of another you-won’t-believe-this-isn’t-photoshopped gallery on Tech Blog, a site I’ve actually heard of previous to this.

And it feels kind of weird to have contributed to the innumerable images floating around in the swirling eddy of the internet. On the one hand, my image’s presence on the web is insignificant, a somewhat interesting picture drowning in a sea of somewhat interesting pictures, a tiny pin in the momentary boredom-postponement machinery I and so many of my coevals (read: you, valiant blog reader) have come to rely on. But on the other hand, there’s a tantalizing taste of immortality in it, the comfort of perpetuity, the image having taken on a life of its own.  I have contributed to the fabric of the internet in a small way, and that, shallow though it may be, elevates me, validates me in some strange way.  It’s as if the internet is telling me: yes, you were right to find this interesting.  There are other people out there like you, who find these same little things interesting or poignant, just like you.  You are not alone.  And isn’t that the point of the internet?  To be together in our loneliness?